Web design & marketing tips by Ironpaper

GitHub creates website to help developers with licensing

Written by Ironpaper | Jul 16, 2013 3:25:39 PM

Github created a website to help web, application, software and mobile developers open source licensing--ChooseALicense.com.

The website outlines the differences between GPL, Apache, and MIT licenses issuing your software with no license at all. This licensing website is a solution to help Github's developer community, since a significant number of GitHub projects seem to offer no rights whatsoever for other community members to use their code in an open source project. That is because many of these projects simply don't have an OSI-approved open source license.

The new website provides a simplified perspective around open source licenses and provides context to their effects. The website itself is open-source and can be forked: https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com. Github has even begun to encourage users to select a copyright when creating a new project. Developers using Github will begin to see a new selector that provides streamlined options for open source licensing. Github will also auto-create a readme file in the root directory of the project repository.